Five Reasons Halloween Was My Favorite Holiday When I was a Kid

1)    NO FAMILY DRAMA

 

Halloween was the one holiday that my family did not celebrate collectively.  This meant there was no three day housecleaning before or after the holiday.  There was no huge meal to prepare, and consequently no sniping about who was lazy and just brought a jello salad, who made the wrong kind of potato salad, who put too much salt in everything, or who needed to learn that not every holiday needed a cake baked in a mold.  The most food prep that occurred on Halloween was the roasting of pumpkin seeds, and if they burned we ate them anyway.  In addition, there was no one deliberately showing up late, no cousins messing with the order of my toys, and no confusing references to feuds that had started twenty years before I was born but were still potent enough for someone to end up storming off and sitting in a corner.

 

2)    Costumes

 

On a regular school day, my mother stopped me at the door and asked, “Is that really what you’re wearing to school today?”  Halloween was the one day I could cut up whatever old clothes I wanted.  I could wear favorite clothes that were too small.  I could put pussywillows in my hair.  I could draw on myself, not brush my hair, and completely ignore the dreaded concept of “color coordination”. I could even wear dirty clothes to school on Halloween. The only interference I would get was the coat argument, which I’m pretty sure my mother knew she never actually won.  As soon as she drove off, I took off my coat( I did that every day, but on Halloween the neighbor didn’t rat me out.)

 

3)     Freaking Real Candy!

 

Unlike some of my classmates whose parents told them sugar was POISON, my parents weren’t anti-sugar advocates.  They were anti-buying-things-that-are-unnecessary advocates.  I got lots of sweets when I was a kid, but they were mainly homemade.  Pies, cakes, cookies, puddings, canned pears with whipped cream and graham crackers(yeah, I didn’t quite get what that was about either), jellies, fruit breads, cream puffs, soufflés, we had those kinds of sweets three or four times a week as dessert.  Candy, however, was a waste of money.  Since we could get candy for free on Halloween, my parents actively encouraged my brothers and I to haul in as big a stash as we possibly could. We each got a pillowcase and were told to fill that sucker up. Halloween and Easter were the two times a year I was guaranteed to get candy.  Even though my mother was an excellent cook, I was completely jealous of my friends who were occasionally allowed to have REAL candy in their lunches.  No one ever begged for a bite of one of my deflated and leaky cream puffs.  That all changed for a week after Halloween.

 

4)    Being allowed to Run Around in the Dark

 

Honestly, I was the kind of creepy kid who ran around at night anyway, especially if there was a full moon.  On Halloween, though, I got to do it with other kids without being seen as creepy.  Since we lived out in the country, my mother would drive my brothers and me to town, drop us off at a street corner, and tell us to be back there by nine o’ clock.  My older brother would usually ditch me and my little brother and end up frantically racing through the streets searching for us fifteen minutes before the pick up time.  Then he’d charge us a percentage of our candy for taking us trick-or-treating.  Still, there was something completely cool about roaming the dark streets with masses of other children that trumped my usual skulks in the dark.  Even though I was never one to throw eggs, leave flaming bags of dog poop on doorsteps, or drape toilet paper on people’s trees, there was nothing more magical than standing in the midst of that kind of chaos while everyone accepted it as normal.

 

5)    Candy Leverage!!!!!

 

Having a huge stash of candy gave me bargaining power with my brothers, my friends, and even my parents.  My younger brother was always reluctant to play the games I invented.  I don’t know why things like jumping off the cattle barn, drinking polluted creek water, rolling in marsh mud from head to toe, and swimming through the seaweed section of the pond didn’t appeal to him, but he quickly decided to give them a try if I pulled out a piece of stale, six month old Hubba Bubba gum as a bribe.  My older brother could actually be persuaded to let me sit in his room and stare at him while he worked on one of his projects if I suggested that a strawberry flavored Charleston Chew might miraculously slide under his door sometime after supper.  My dad was easy: I’d say, “Here’s some candy corn. Can we go on a nature hike today?”  My mother was the most challenging: she had too much integrity to be outright bribed, but offering her the black licorice went in her notebook of “evidence my child is not completely selfish and possibly deserves something when she asks for it”.  This kind of leverage could last all year if I got the right types of candy and carefully hid them to be used at the most advantageous time.  Candy leverage was the one thing that made growing up in a candy-frugal home worth it: you can’t bribe people with things that they get all the time.